Re-Thinking Intellectual Labour:

Reyner Banham as the Speculative Philosopher

Julia Moszkowicz (unpublished conference paper)

Abstract

The concerns of this paper are focussed on common-sense understandings of ‘the intellectual’ in academic life and how they relate to philosophical constitutions of human will. It will be argued that the intellectual has traditionally been configured as someone possessive of philosophical subjectivity and caught up in a (political) movement towards the as-yet-to-be, forever moving towards the future with hope.[i] In this regard, the intellectual has been largely seen as someone deeply involved in political activity and ultimately determined towards a progressive social agenda: certainly since the Frankfurt School, a critic involved in critique.

I will now demonstrate how the figure of an ‘unfashionable’ architectural historian might now be put to timely use, contributing to a wider debate about these normative configurations of intellectual work in academic life. In particular, I will demonstrate how the eclectic and uneven writing of Reyner Banham offers a way re-thinking intellectual labour beyond academic tradition, providing a model that engages with the contemporary context of consumer culture. The focal point will be Banham’s deep suspicion of Adult Education, his ambivalence towards 'progressive' agendas and his celebration of Popular Culture.

Banham’s negative opinions of expert-intellectual culture will be viewed in relation to his strong sense of origins and of belonging to the ‘other side’. For those who have entered academic life from the melee of consumer culture, for example, this might open up the possibility of working with a different understanding of the intellectual enterprise; one that allows ‘academics’ to keep returning to the past and starting again. Indeed, the ‘reflex response’ cited in Banham’s work, induced by one’s non-academic origins, could be seen as vital to staying connected with the Social and Historical moment, keeping the expert-intellectual in touch with those who refuse to enter the Ivory Tower and reject the significance of academic tradition.

Key Words: Academic, intellectual, Reyner Banham, conflict-resolution, critical distance, speculative philosophy.

1. Introduction

This paper works with the understanding that the role of the intellectual – as encountered in the academic field - is frequently configured in terms of conflict and resolution. The Marxist academic, for example, has traditionally been invested with a dialectical relationship to the world, speaking on behalf of a marginal underclass and in opposition to a dominant order. Conceived as operating within this antagonistic relation to the capitalist system, the role of the academic-intellectual has been one of critique or hegemonic subversion.[ii]

I would now like to discuss this idea of conflict and antagonism, in a way that hesitates before it moves towards any kind of closure. I want to stay with it – the uneasiness - before it moves clearly away from Marxist critique and settles on a neo-Marxist state of indeterminancy.[iii] I would like to capture some of the discomfort of the academic subject, who is in the early stages of working to satisfy a disposition towards narrative solutions. For this reason, the paper presented here is caught up in the ‘problem’ of problem-solving itself and asks whether the aspiration to settle our differences is a necessary condition of our intellectual engagements? I would like to ask: am I always moving towards closure? Also, what happens if I keep returning to the same place; is getting ‘stuck’ always a sign of inadequate research or thinking?

In order to discuss these questions, I will draw on the work of a post war British critic called Reyner Banham, whose contribution to architectural history is sometimes understood as inconsistent and contradictory.[iv] He is remembered, for example, for his contribution to Modernist discourse - for his critique of Le Corbusier’s machine aesthetic and re-visitation of Expressionist phrases within the Modern architectural movement.[v] He is also remembered for his enthusiastic engagement with the vernacular architecture of Los Angeles and playfulness with baby boomer speech.[vi] Indeed, it is in this very mix of iconographies - drawn from post war consumer culture and pre-war aesthetic tradition - that lies at the very heart of his contested image. His eclecticism seems to beg the question: can an academic “dig” a new scene and yet retain a sense of intellectual enquiry? In other words, is an academic-intellectual permitted to generate (more) contradictions in the process of thinking and doing?

2. Conflict and Resolution

I will begin by briefly considering two tenets of Marxist critique that lie at the heart of the conflict-resolution model cited above. The first is the notion of ‘critical distance’ whereby the work of the intellectual subject is invested with a sense of objectivity. Much like an aesthete’s understanding of an aesthetic experience, critical distance identifies the space between that occupied by the viewing subject and that occupied by the unthinking ‘Other’: be it an object or a person.[vii] Critical distance, in this regard, marks out an intellectual territory somehow situated - in the temporal domain of thought - beyond the reach of ‘ordinary’ collective consciousness. For an aesthete, this amounts to a positive experience, whereby critical activity is characterized by ‘alienation’ from everyday life and the products of industrial labour. Indeed, one might argue that critical distance offers an unusually affirmative view of the alienated state, whereby the intellectual is seen in terms of a detached observer who is cut-off from the immediacy of social and economic concerns.[viii] To be an intellectual, by these criteria, is to mute the possibility of occupying a detached and disinterested view of the world, and to circulate this ‘critical distance’ as an ideal.

A good example of this approach is offered by The Frankfurt School. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer speak on behalf of those individuals who are entangled within, and subservient to, the “absolute powers of capitalism”.[ix] They see their role as one of overcoming capitalist ideology with Marxist critique, the academic-intellectual acting on behalf of those who have “already been suppressed by the control of individual consciousness”.[x] They are in the fortunate position of enjoying critical distance from these same capitalist powers, a position that has been structurally maintained by a semi-autonomous Academy. This critical distance also implies, however, that academic-intellectuals are equally removed from ‘the masses’. Unlike ‘the masses’, the academic-intellectual has a capacity for thinking beyond the immediate or obvious: he is set apart by a fertile political imagination.[xi]

This notion of critical distance consequently involves, and is accompanied by, the aspiration to move others from a passive to active state of consciousness and towards a heightened state of imaginative awareness.

This indicates that the second central motif within this dominant model of intellectual activity is one of linear movement. Indeed the notion of a political movement, for example, has a strong sense of direction and moral purpose; in particular, towards the intellectual ‘movement’ of ‘the masses’ from A to B. As a consequence, Marxist critique can be viewed in terms of classic narrative techniques – usually taking the form of literature or speech – which take the topic of social progress as its fundamental ‘story-telling’ elements.[xii] The structure and content of its Grand Narratives capture the movement of History itself, arranging events into logical sequence. In this way, the intellectual movement of ‘the masses’ is confined to - or contained within – a repetitive and conventional plot structure, one that aspires to work towards an idealized political goal (such as imaginative emancipation, for example).

In this way the Frankfurt School encapsulates a type of intellectual journey that takes place within an overarching progressive narrative structure, one that resolves as quickly as it configures. Hence I have referred to it in terms of a conflict-resolution model of intellectual labour.

3. The Atavism of Reyner Banham

I will now argue that the work of Reyner Banham offers a significant contribution to the wider problematization of this conflict-resolution model; in particular, the way the model fails to address the ‘untidy’ experience of being ‘academic’.[xiii] Banham’s capacity for self-contradiction and critical ambivalence did not make him ineffectual as a critic or person. As design writer Penny Sparke has described, Banham “learnt from the adman, techniques of selling through evocation and suggestion”.[xiv] Indeed, one might argue that the unsteady nature of his academic profile or position – the overall triumph of his bons mots over his grands narratives - was beneficial to his practice. It enabled him to continue moving freely across a range of critical discourses.

The eclecticism of his life and work suggest a different take on intellectual practice, one that arguably offers a closer approximation of the day-to-day world and social context of academic-intellectual in contemporary life. Certainly, it is one that speaks openly to the wider vagaries of post war consumer culture, where the Academy is now more integrated into the market economy.

I will call this model of intellectual practice - Critical Atavism. This borrows from the title of Banham’s most famous article: ‘The Atavism of the Short-Distance Mini-Cyclist’ (first published in 1964), where he describes the capacity of cultural artifacts to “take you back where you came in”.[xv] Banham speaks of this atavistic impulse in terms of an awakening: of being thrown back to a familiar-but-different way of thinking and living. For this reason atavism is seen in a positive light, enabling the social subject to face the confluence of past into present. It describes the re-emergence of something after a long period of absence.

It is worth noting, furthermore, that he avoids using the word anachronistic, which would encourage this sequential disturbance to be read in negative terms: as disruptive of the flow of personal intellectual ‘development’. Rather, he welcomes the opportunity to contemplate his own cultural and intellectual movement from A to B and back again. For this reason I see this model as a challenge to the conflict-resolution model of Marxist intellectual practice (outlined above); characterized, as it is, with endless stops, starts and new beginnings.

As someone who championed Popular Culture in terms of the ‘expendability’ and ‘obsolescence’ of its product cycle,[xvi] Banham’s preference for riding a fold-away bike through the streets of London and forever wearing a cloth cap seem strangely at odds with his literary rhetoric. Banham embraces this perceived ‘conflict’ of interest, however, in terms of life’s atavistic impulses. It was the return of his Norfolk past and “the naïve stuff” in the midst of an otherwise disposable culture:[xvii] a coming home. In ‘The Atavism of the Short-Distance Mini-Cyclist’, he clearly speaks about living with, and being caught within, a series of contradictions. When discussing the Independent Group’s involvement in the Pop Art movement, for instance, he says that:

We are very much at home with this material … we are in our own culture, sub-culture, or whatever you like to call it … [not] a working class a la Hoggart … [but a] working class culture in the sense an anthropologist would normally describe and understand it; the way that working class people live, the kind of cultural standards they hold, enjoy and respond to.[xviii]

He continues by saying: “We dig pop, which is acceptance culture, capitalistic, and yet in our formal politics, if I may use the phrase, most of us belong to the other side.”[xix]

Atavism, in this respect, is a way of describing an experience of being thrown back on oneself: of being thrown off-guard by the reappearance of a characteristic from a past life, which has returned after a long period of absence. For Banham, this sudden unsettling of one’s current position spoke eloquently of two things: firstly, that one cannot assume sequential continuity within the trajectory of one’s own life, and secondly, that an individual’s sense of personal development is particularly at risk if one now occupies a radically altered (intellectual) scene from one’s past.

Banham argues that the place where you come into the world – geographically, economically, historically – shapes your disposition towards contemporary life, in a way that sometimes gets marginalized by the academic trajectory of your intellectual path.[xx] For this reason, Banham was highly critical of the Adult Education Movement in Britain, questioning why it encouraged the working classes to evacuate one place for another. He says:

“The rise of the working classes to political power has rested upon someone equipping them with the right kind of responses to social and political situations, manipulative responses.”[xxi] What makes him angry is how the academic trajectory assumes a designation of ‘enlightened state of being’, with the origins of the working class subject – generally ‘subsumed’ within consumer culture - left at the margins.

For Banham, however, it becomes a possibility for people to use their original stories, atavistically. He advises that the place “where you came in”[xxii] gives you a critical reflex that might seem at odds with your stated critical position today: and could be useful for this very reason. Indeed, it could make you aware that academic traditions are in competition with other cultural forces and, in a sense, they are also in competition with one’s sense of ‘self’. He challenges the monopoly of academia on understandings of intellectual labour, unsettling – I would suggest - its main tenets of ‘critical distance’ and ‘progressive movement’.

When Banham applauds Pop for recognizing how Art is competing with other forms of entertainment for people’s time and interest, he understands that people’s attention is subject to the variables of the world and, in particular, the dominance of the media. He recognizes that living day-to-day necessarily puts the academic subject into tension: his ‘critical distance’ and aspiration towards progress and conflict-resolution are undermined by techno-historical conditions. Intellectual subjectivity, he ultimately reminds us, is offered by the Academy in an idealized form. Banham says, “It’s preserved as a minority culture like, say, reed thatching or horn dancing,”[xxiii], in spite of the fact that it is transformed by everything from the unevenness of the marketplace to our own intellectual development.

4. The Intellectual as Speculator

I hope to have demonstrated that the conflict and contradictions that characterize Banham’s work – and his discussion of atavism, in particular - indicate an ambivalence towards academic constitutions of ‘the intellectual’ that encourage us to re-think the role of intellectuals today. In particular Banham offers an encouragement to place less emphasis on the intellectual as a progressive ‘academic’ (as someone engaged in clearly defined social and historical ‘work’) and place more emphasis on being an intellectual in practice (as someone who is caught up in, and engages with, ‘a whole way of life’):[xxiv].

This notion of ‘a whole way of life’ might make an immediate connection to the work of cultural historian Raymond Williams, who also aimed to place lived experience back on the critical agenda.[xxv] However, I would like to posit an alternative context for these ideas and hence, unsettle a Post War Cultural Studies’ trajectory towards narrative closure in favour of an approach that embraces the vagaries of intellectual embodiment.

Howard Caygill’s work is useful here, for he unsettles this common understanding of the intellectual as a coherent subject who peacefully legislates in a condition of freedom (at some optimum ‘critical distance’). Indeed, Caygill reminds us that intellectuals operate within a ‘metaphysical realm’, which is marked by thought and critical reflection but also by war and factionalism.[xxvi] He states that: “The laws and categories of experience issue not from an act of self legislation, but from a decision to call a truce in a condition of violence.”[xxvii]

Howard Caygill thus challenges this notion of an idealized intellectual subject in a way that foregrounds antagonism. Furthermore, he foregrounds the idea of ‘subjective transition’ – or subjects who are moving one way and then another - in a way that challenges this idea of the intellectual as a stable category. In his discussion of the early writings of Walter Benjamin, he discusses the idea of a subject in movement – but not into the academic distance or in a straight line. He speaks of the social subject who is open to the spatial and temporal transitivity of the city, for example, and whose sense of continuity can be swiftly disrupted by changes in architecture or light, that is to say, by highly localized conditions.[xxviii]

Howard Caygill advocates an intellectual practice of ‘speculative philosophy’, one that allows for such flexibility of movement one’s disposition towards the world, and all that this entails. He says, “this experience of transitivity is ambiguous: it is not only the condition for the experience of joy, but also for poverty.”[xxix]

For me, this speculative philosophy resembles Banham’s erratic forays through the post war British scene: with his own kind of kinetic, atavistic philosophy of the subject. It allows for the fact that intellectuals have political motives and movements without assuming the direction of movement across a stable critical and imaginative divide.

5. Conclusion

I began by asking: are intellectuals always moving towards closure?

I hope to have shown that intellectuals are always in movement, but this movement is multi-directional.

Banham’s ‘atavism’ and Caygill’s ‘speculative philosophy’ both suggest that the life of an intellectual does not have to be understood in terms of a goal-oriented trajectory.

Finally, I asked whether an intellectual can “dig” a new scene and yet retain a sense of intellectual integrity?

Banham put his reputation at risk and his integrity in doubt for liking the ‘wrong’ things. Only wider acceptance of the model of the speculative intellectual – one who is in movement and caught up in transitivity - will challenge the moral superiority of the coherent and continuous academic subject of the Frankfurt School and beyond.

Being stuck in contradiction is not being intellectually stuck, or dumb or stupid. It is facing up to a lack of resolution within the intellectual enterprise itself…

Notes

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[i] See E Bloch, The Principle of Hope: volume three, MIT, London, 1996.

[ii] For a detailed discussion of hegemonic struggle within the field of youth, music and fashion, see Dick Hebdige Subculture: the meaning of style

[iii] For detailed discussion of ‘indeterminancy’ see J. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: semiotics, literature, deconstruction, Routledge Kegan Paul, London, 1981.

[iv] P. Sparke (ed.), Design by Choice: ideas in architecture, Academy Editions, London, 1981, pp.17-18.

[v] R Banham, ‘Machine Aesthetic’ (1955), in Design by Choice: ideas in architecture, Academy Editions, P. Sparke (ed), London, 1981, pp.44-47.

[vi] R. Banham, ‘Zoom Wave Hits Architecture’ (1966), in P. Sparke (ed), Design by Choice: ideas in architecture, Academy Editions, London, 1981, pp.64-65.

[vii] For more on the idea of ‘disinterestedness’ see R. Fry, Vision and Design, Penguin, London, 1961.

[viii] For more on the idea of critical distance see F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures?: the significance of C P Snow, Chatto and Windus, London, 1962.

[ix] T. Adorno & M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, London, 1986, p.120.

[x] ibid. p.121.

[xi] Another classic Frankfurt School text that deals with notions of critical distance and political imagination is H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

[xii] For more on the idea of History as ‘story-telling’ or ‘grand narrative’ see J-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984.

[xiii] See J. Lacey 'Discursive mothers and academic fandom: class, generation and the production of theory', in S.R. Munt (ed.), Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change, Cassell, London, 2002.

[xiv] Sparke, op. cit., p.18.

[xv] R. Banham in Sparke, op. cit., p.84.

[xvi] R. Banham, ‘A Throw-Away Aesthetic’ (1955), in P. Sparke, op. cit., pp.90-91.

[xvii] R. Banham in Sparke, op. eit., p.84.

[xviii] ibid, p.84.

[xix] ibid. p.85.

[xx] The idea of one’s intellectual past leaving a ‘residue’ corresponds to Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on taste and cultural distinction. See P. Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, Routledge, London, 1986.

[xxi] R. Banham in P. Sparke, op. cit., p.86.

[xxii] ibid. p.84.

[xxiii] ibid. p.86.

[xxiv] For more detailed discussion of culture as ‘a whole way of life’, see R. Williams Culture and Society Verso, London.

[xxv] ibid.,

[xxvi] H. Caygill p.25-28

[xxvii] H. Caygill p.27

[xxviii] ibid., p. 120

[xxix] ibid., p.122